Vancouver Downtown-Eastside a ghetto ...! - A Political Profetico for 2014 and onwards! - why mention much anything else !

Pete McMartin: Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a ghetto made by outsiders (with video and map)A new list compiled by The Sun includes 30 health care operations, 30 services for families, and more than 100 linked to housing. Sun reporters Lori Culbert and Pete McMartin ask why they are all crammed into one tiny neighbourhood?

[[["...Nearly $1 million a day is spent providing low-cost housing, social services and other support to vulnerable residents of the Downtown Eastside, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found.

The news outlet compiled, for the first time in recent history, a list of every agency that operates in the Downtown Eastside or provides a service there, and also tallied the organizations’ annual revenues.

In 2013, $360 million was spent by 260 agencies and housing sites to help roughly 6,500 people. Most are poor; many have addictions or mental health challenges.

Three-quarters of that money comes from taxpayers, as the agencies received funding from the provincial ($231 million), municipal ($15 million) and federal ($17 million) governments.

You drive down Hastings Street through the Downtown Eastside. You see the roiling parade of stumblebums and addicts on the sidewalks, the rows of ruined buildings.

You feel disgust. Or perhaps pity. Or anger and frustration that the efforts of police, government and a multitude of social welfare agencies encamped there have, for decades, had no effect on the obvious problems you see, that this festering sore in the heart of Vancouver continues to be a sinkhole to hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.

I have felt all that myself.

But what if those problems were a matter of perspective? What if you were not looking in at the Downtown Eastside but looking out from it? What if you lived or worked there, just as you do in your neighborhood?

Your sense of blame might be different. You might see those problems as something forced upon you — by government, by do-gooding academics and poverty activists, and most especially by the residents of every other neighbourhood in Metro Vancouver who, despite their insistence that Something Should Be Done About The Downtown Eastside, really want nothing to be done about the Downtown Eastside because they have tacitly agreed to allow the continued ghettoization of the city’s mental health and addiction problems for fear those problems might spread to their own neighbourhoods...."]]]--------------------------------------------------------

...you can live better in Canada...!

...but if you fall into some disgrace, the lower end of society, is really low...!

...the English health system and supply to the poor, is gone with the high cost of everything...!

...the STATISTICS REFLECT WRONGLY, THAT THE LOWER END OF LIFE IS LOW IN NUMBERS...! Which is really wrong...! Thousands are poor and live a border life as bad as most 3rd. 4th world countries...! THOUSANDS IS A BIG NUMBER, THOUGH 1-10% MAY SEEM SMALL...!